The Butler Libraries’ Classic Catalog will be down for service and unavailable Thursday-Friday November 22-23. We hope you’ll be enjoying the holiday instead of doing research, but if you do need to search the library’s physical collections, the Primo search box on our page will be up and fully operational. No online databases or ebooks will be affected by this outage, only the Classic Catalog that lists the physical items on the shelves.

The Libraries will be closed for the Thanksgiving holiday from Thursday-Saturday, and will reopen on Sunday November 24 at 2 PM.

On Friday, April 20th Irwin Library played host the the Undergraduate Research Conference Poster Sessions. There were about 130 posters presented as well as several Visual Art displays. The presenters were from universities throughout the Midwest. The information presented by these students was nothing short of amazing.

We were just informed that the Holcomb building housing the Ruth Lilly Science Library has been closed and evacuated due to a water main leak. We do not know when the building will reopen.

Science and Pharmacy students who usually study in Holcomb are encouraged to use the facilities at the Irwin Library this weekend, 10 AM – 9 PM Saturday and 10 AM to 2 AM Sunday. We will be opening up as much of the building as possible to accommodate student traffic.

The ButlerLib blog that we use for internal communications has just been updated. We now have a plugin that allows email notifications when someone posts a message. All library staff are subscribed to the ButlerLib blog, so whenever anyone posts anything on the blog, everyone will automatically receive an email with the contents of the new post. No more copying links and emailing them out to everyone.

For those that want to post something on ButlerLib, visit https://blogs.butler.edu/butlerlib and (after logging in with your Butler username and password) look over on the left for the “Posts” box and click on “Add New” to do just that. Be sure to pick at least one Category and add any relevant Tags.

We also have a link to this blog from DawgBlog’s Links section, so you can here from there also.

Widgets are small applications that provide information or functionality in a little box on a web page.

When working with LibGuides or other online applications, you may want to consider using a widget to add some variety to your page while still helping students learn what you want them to.

Here is a link to a site that has MANY widgets which you can use for free or even which you can create yourself. Examples of useful widgets for LibGuides are crossword puzzles, word searches, matching quizzes, Google maps, timelines, news widgets, flash games, and more.

Have you ever wanted more participation when doing Library Instruction? Butler now has a license for Poll Everywhere. It’s a very easy to use tool that can get input from the students in a classroom in a matter of a minute or two. And they can use the computers or text or tweet their response. Poll Everywhere is FREE for up to 30 students, but Butler’s license is for up to 250 students. If you want to use the licensed version, contact Juliane Miranda in the Center for Academic Technology.

Even though we feel like we’re cramming tons of information into each session, this poll program can help us wake people up and get them involved without taking more than a minute or two of the class. And you can even create a poll 10 minutes before class if you suddenly think of something to ask them.

This tool can also be used in Faculty meetings or even outside of meetings altogether. Results are viewed live and can even be included in PowerPoint (with live updating). Visit their website to find out more or ask Scott for a quick demo.

Beginning this Fall (now, actually), Butler is using a PrintSmart system to track student printing. No charging will be occurring yet, but everyone will be able to get reports showing how much they are printing. This new system will affect everyone in different ways.

Faculty & Staff desktop computers will not have to make any changes because they are already configured. Students logging on to lab computers will be tracked based on their username regardless of location.

Where the difference may affect employees is with PERSONAL laptops.

If you need to print Office or PDF documents from your personal laptop, you can use Web Print: http://printsmart.butler.edu has a link on the left side menu called “Web Print”